Let the Dead Stay Buried
by SongBirdie
Summary: Starts right as Tony boards the plane at the end of 11x02: Her decision not to go home is not a slight against them, it does not mean she does not love him. It means she knows she cannot go home until she knows who she is, and right now she doesn't. It's time for her to learn to let her dead stay buried.


**Let the Dead Stay Buried **

**Disclaimer: **I do not own or make any claim on NCIS; it is the property of its respective creators.

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**Summary: **Starts right as Tony boards the plane at the end of 11x02: Her decision not to go home is not a slight against them, it does not mean she does not love him. It means she knows she cannot go home until she knows who she is, and right now she doesn't. It's time for her to learn to let her dead stay buried.

**Spoilers: **Major ones for S11E2's** Past, Present and Future. **This won't make much sense if you haven't seen it.

**Timeline:** Set as Tony boards the plane at the end of **Past, Present and Future**.

**Author notes:** I both enjoyed and felt let down by the episode **Past, Present and Future**, so this episode tag is my attempt to fill some of the gaps I felt the writers left us with. This story is, at least in my mind, not set in the same universe as my Ziva centered story **Things that were Glorious had no Glory, **which is also about Ziva leaving NCIS. I hope you enjoy this, and if you don't have anything nice to say, please, don't say anything at all.

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She knows he does not understand. She knows she has hurt him, hurt all of them, over and over, and she is sorry, so sorry, but this is something she must do. She doesn't fully understand herself, why she is doing this, who she is, and that is too close to being helpless. And as she was carried out of Saleem's camp, rescued by her friends when she could not rescue herself, could not even believe in herself, she had sworn to never let herself be helpless again. She does not know where she is going, she went back to the beginning, and still, she has no answers, just more questions, and a soul-deep hurt that is only getting worse as the years go by, as she loses more people she loves, as more dreams slip her by. And she does not know how to make it better. You cannot get absolution from the dead, but that doesn't seem to stop her from trying.

She'd known she shouldn't do it, shouldn't pick at the wounds that were so thinly scabbed over, never truly healed even if they were no longer actively bleeding. But her need for absolution, for someone to console her, who understood her pain, who remembered the people she'd lost, who missed them like she did, had overridden her common sense. It had drowned out the voice in her mind telling her to let the dead stay buried, that no good could come of raising them. So she had went to Dina, still not able to believe that the woman she talked to in passing at her father's funeral was so grown up, that they were no longer the children that used to terrorize the building, her, Dina, and Ari, with little Tali begging to come along and play with them.

But they have not been those children in a very long time, and half of them are dead, leaving the rest walking around wounded, missing something, _someone_ out of their reach. And it is not fair, and she knew Dina would not react well to the truth of what happened with Ari, but she was the only one of them besides her left, of everyone in the building she'd grown up in, all of her family is dead, and she had just wanted her friend to absolve her, even if she couldn't, even if it wasn't her place, because she is the only person living who knows what they have lost left for Ziva to ask.

Dina could not, would not, absolve her, and she never knew Ari was in love with Dina, and she cannot understand if she missed that part of her brother's life, too, or if Ari had once been truly in love with Dina, and that too died with so much else when things went the way they had, and in doing so left Dina with a promise of something more that never came, or if he took advantage of the girl who had been in love with him since they had been children, and Dina just refused to see it. She does not know, and there is no one, living or dead, left for her to ask.

And she knows if Ari _was_ using Dina, that it simply proves he was too far gone to be saved, that it should make her feel better, but it does not. No matter what he had done, he is her brother, and she misses him every minute of every day, and the guilt of what she had to do is the albatross around her neck. She sees him in her dreams, along with her father, mother, and Tali. And she misses them all, but Ari is the wound that will never heal, the one that is self-inflicted. She can never regret saving Gibbs, but she will never be okay with killing her brother. She is so tired of death, of destruction, of the pain inside of her. And she feels guilty being in pain around her friends, for to them Ari is Ziva's evil-half brother who killed Kate, and they do not understand how she can mourn him, so she goes out of her way not to show them.

She knows Tony does not understand. She knows he feels rejected. She knows he doesn't get why she can't find herself with him, in D.C., with people who love her. And she is sorry to have hurt him, she is. She loves him, but she does not know if being _in_ love with him is a good idea for either of them. But her decision not to go home has nothing to do with that in the end. She loves them all, and their support of her means everything to her, but it's not the answer this time. She has gone back to the beginning, she has made a new home, started over, and right now she needs time to learn how to not outrun her ghosts, but to live with them, for they are not going anywhere, and she cannot do that if every corner holds a memory, if every day has a schedule and a place for her to be. She cannot find herself if she needs to be her for other people. And she wants to be able to go back to them, she is not dead, she would not have given her Star of David necklace to Tony for safekeeping if she did not plan to come back for it one day, she's just gone for now.

She picks up her phone and listens to it ring. She has a phone call to make, she owes him that much. She breaths in and then out in the time between each ring. She hears it connect.

"Hey, Ziver."

It's time for her to let the dead stay buried. For him, she will.

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Written on October 27th, 2013

Posted on April 7th, 2014

By Valerie Portolano


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